


universal constant

by witchfall



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Idiots in Love, Mild Sexual Content, Miqo'te Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), Named Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), The Echo (Final Fantasy XIV), might not be entirely canon compliant but whatever fight me god, weird ponderances of the echo's horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-24
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:21:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27180326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/witchfall/pseuds/witchfall
Summary: G’raha’s world ends. She dies. And then, inexplicably, she doesn’t.The Echo, he comes to realize, is a callous master.
Relationships: G'raha Tia | Crystal Exarch/Warrior of Light
Comments: 8
Kudos: 46





	universal constant

The first time G'raha sees her go down in a fight, he forgets how to breathe.

It is only a fraction of a moment. The air is knocked out of her in a thick cry. He hears the skid of her feet against mud and stone and the clatter of her bow upon the ground, even amid the heavy rain. 

She becomes a wet pile of leathers, unmoving for just a moment too long. 

An imperial mech bears down on her, but G'raha’s feet move automatically. He hurls his body over her and then he throws up his arm, summoning a shield of light just as a gigantic sword crashes toward them both. His arm vibrates so hard from the blow that his teeth clatter. His off-arm digs deep into the dirt. His eyes water -- and then Alisaie sets the enemy alight with red flares. Metal explodes in fiery flints over the field. He ducks under his shield so that his forehead nearly brushes Izzie's, and the battle stills, if only for a moment.

He opens his eyes (when had he closed them? Everything moves too fast for him to remember) and is met by Izzie staring up at him, her sea glass eyes bright against the mud smears on her face. Gods, he thinks, gods and wicked white and every curse, of course she is fine. Of course. The thought alone is cooling as a salve. He remembers to breathe. 

But then she is suddenly, impossibly close, her breath hot against his face. She yanks him up by the biceps. Her fingernails dig into his skin, even through his clothes. She shakes him fiercely, yelling something, and it happens so quickly he doesn't process what she is saying until--

"--so don't fucking do that!" she shouts over the rain. "Some blows aren't meant for you!"

"Izzie--" Her name spills out of his mouth, but the rest of his words clot in his throat. _Am I supposed to just stand here?_

She shoves him away before he can finish.

The fight swells and her fury becomes magnificent to behold. He loses track of her, but never completely. He would hear her over the loudest of dins; whether via the lingering mysticism of the Crystal Tower or this young body's constant yearning, her soul has left deep marks on him. Its aura presses like high tide, smothering and heady in its power. Arrows fly. Her voice rises to haunting crescendo. Magitek scatters to blue sparks and flame. Only later when she vice grips his shoulders does he see the sickness that drives her into reckless battle. Her eyes scan him so thoroughly he would have blushed if he had the energy.

"Okay," she breathes. She shakes and shakes and shakes. Heavy rain plinks on dead metal. All else is silent. He could hear her bones chatter together, if he listened hard enough. "Okay," she says again. "We're fine."

She sways on her feet. He wraps his arms around her taut waist and pulls her close, but she resists him, tensing in his arms, turning her face away from him. Blood and ceruleum and ash drip from her pale skin as rain showers them both. He rubs her forehead with his thumb, but his gloves are dirtied with battle, and so he simply leaves another smear.

"Izzie, look at me."

"I'm fine."

"I know--"

"I just need..." She sucks in a breath between her teeth. He would give her anything she asks. The moon and every star in the sky. "Just give me a second."

He purses his lips. He pushes her hair from her drenched forehead and tests her tension. "I don't think I'll ever get used to it," he says. 

She bristles in his arms. Her nails dig into his wrists. She is a bow string near to snap. "So?"

He blinks. "What?"

She sniffs heavily and still won't look at him. "This isn't new."

But he had never been in the field like this, never felt the slick of dirt and grime on her like this, never smelled blood and gunpowder in her hair like this. He drinks her in, how small she seems now, soaked by rain. He is well aware that she is only in his arms because she allows it, but the dichotomy between Izzie of the Fight -- the Izzie the stories sing about -- and the Izzie of the Aftermath is discordant. He fears one of them may shatter from the sound.

"I'm sorry," he says. "You're right."

A heartbeat passes between them. When she finally turns to speak into his shoulder, her voice is near lost in the rain. "...Just let me do my job."

He sways in place, holding her in his arms. He knows that tone -- the determination, the resignation of it. The stubborn will to stand in the storm so no others will. It is the only way she knows how to seize control.

An old frustration makes his tail thrash.

There is no time here to hash it out, not as the other Scions begin to approach. There is no time for him to spill his heart on the floor for her -- to explain just how each blow she takes is one for him, too.

"Alright," he says, picking his battles. "Alright."

* * *

It isn't always like that. But he does learn just how terrible of a chirurgeon patient she is.

After another engagement at Bozja, Izzie lays her head in G'raha's lap while Krile sews up the re-opened gash in her side. Izzie grits her teeth. _You’re here as a distraction. And a focus. So she remembers not to throw me across the room_ , Krile had said, blase, and G’raha couldn’t tell if she was joking. Izzie’s body jerks as Krile begins another stitch. Her hand grips his tightly enough his mouth pops open in shock.

“Sorry,” Izzie hisses out. She lets go immediately. “Sorry.”

“I fear this is my doing." He manages a light tone despite the throttling nature of the pain. He opts to let his thumbs linger at her temples, instead. "For making you laugh too hard.”

“Shame on you.” She smirks up at him, wobbly and disjointed, and affection floods him, warm and rounded. She jolts again.

He brushes hair from her brow. “Are you sure you--”

“Nope,” Izzie says quickly. “I’ve had worse.”

Izzie, he discovers, hates pain medicine -- hates the way it blurs her thoughts and stunts her movement, even for something as routine as stitches, and he realizes he is there to shine like a sharp light through the sensation of Krile digging into her flesh.

“Prepare yourself, Warrior,” the lalafell says, and she goes for another stitch.

Izzie almost thrashes out of G’raha’s lap. He presses his palms into her shoulders, startled. He would soothe her with a healing spell but he’d been yelled at by Krile enough for that; such spells interfere with chirurgeon work by making the body repair along bad seams.

“Bitchass mother _fucker_ , _Krile_!” Izzie seethes in his lap, eyes watering. “You’re doing this on purpose!”

An old, silent war rages as Krile meets her patient’s gaze. _It doesn’t have to be like this_ , Krile would say. _We live in a society with medicine._ And Izzie would insist upon it because her stubbornness is near a sickness of its own. He frowns.

She is a horrible patient for one who must be treated so often.

Even so, she is not the only one with hurts -- and despite everything, he comes to cherish the moments late in the eve when both lay in bed, beaten and bruised and tired and _together_. He relishes the way her body melts into his when he smooths his hands over her shoulders, healing aether warming his palms. The way she presses messy kisses into his chest, his wrists, his jaw. The rejuvenating rest allowed two people, waking in shared soreness, beneath the soft dawn light.

It’s not so bad, he thinks; it’s all he ever wanted. It is a deeply survivable thing, to share these burdens.

Until, sometimes, it isn’t.

* * *

Her striking shadow slices the beam of Garlemald’s fearsome weaponry, a flare in the negative against roiling light. He stands struck by her glory.

And then his stomach curdles as her shadow scatters, like grass eaten by locusts, beneath the assault. 

He doesn’t even have time to scream. 

She's gone.

She's _gone_.

He feels outside his own body, staring blankly at the scorch mark left behind on the ground where she stood. His feet move on their own.

Thancred shouts for him to hold the line. The man's voice barely registers over the white noise buzzing in G'raha's ears. What line is there left to hold? Was it really doomed to end like this? Even with the balance of the Universe reset by centuries just to--

Wait.

A figure appears amid the smoke and shadow, and he has to blink back the blurred edges of his vision.

She’s... _there_. 

She stands, whole, where she should not be -- a filagree of light against the dark. Silence rolls across the field. It’s as if she’d never been gone at all. 

She turns toward him, face blank. His throat is hoarse. He realizes he is screaming her name. The world skips past him like a broken orchestrion roll until he has her in his arms, pulling her down from the outcropping that made her such an obvious target.

She doesn’t resist him. “Raha?”

Hate surges through him then, suddenly -- a fear so poisonous it cripples him -- and he realizes the hate is not for Garlemald or even the killing blow but for the heroic image she strikes despite the damage it clearly ekes. She blinks helplessly, eyes reddened and bloody. Burns seep away from her skin like paint under rain, disappearing before his eyes. She gropes in desperation until she finds his chest and her hand wraps around the edge of his scarf. Her dirt-caked nails leave grimy splotches on the fabric.

“Do I have my bow?” she manages.

He can’t speak. Her hands reach for the weapon anyway. 

His heart rips. “You shouldn’t--”

“I’m okay, darlin’.” Her voice is an unusual, knowing calm. “You shouldn’t be this far afield.”

And she turns away. She somehow returns to the fight. No one asks. They don’t need to.

He looks toward the backline and sees the rest of the Scions watching him.

They deal with it in their own ways, he realizes then. It's why Alphinaud focuses so hard on healing and the reason Alisaie throws her all into her offensive battery. It’s one of the myriad reasons Thancred took up his position as the group’s shield. Why Y’shtola turned from conjury to the most fearsome of black magics. Why Urianger brought the power of the stars to bear.

If they are enough, she doesn’t have to go through that.

The battle ends, largely a stalemate but slightly in their favor. Even Izzie tires. G’raha’s body protests but he ignores it; he half-carries her back to the camp and does not let her out of arm’s reach until they’ve regained enough energy to teleport back to the Rising Stones. Even then he feels she could too easily slip from this coil.

He knows she is not feeling right because she doesn’t rebuff him.

He fears his uselessness. A habit from a century of living with want. While he quietly helps her out of her armor and into a bath, he ponders what the Echo has wrought. He sprinkles healing salt into the water. 

She died. She died! Her body flipped like a switch to a moment before her demise, shivering and burned, gasping for air. 

He wonders at its function alongside her connection to the Ancients. It’s different from revival; she was disintegrated. The Echo made it not so. He knows she _can_ die. He lived centuries to prevent that very outcome. But which deaths are final? Which can she shrug off? How many does she get? 

Does she exist outside the usual laws of time and space? A paracausal existence, where cause and effect do not matter in ways comprehensible to the Spoken mind? If Hydaelyn and Zodiark are merely primals, the most powerful of all meant to rewrite the laws of science, is it possible that glimpsing the power of the Ancients makes it so the most Blessed of Her heart can only be felled in the most horrific and reality-twisting of ways?

Why? Why would that be Her solution?

He jolts when her wet palm settles against his cheek. “Hey.”

He breathes deep. Her soap smells like lavender and honey. He presses his mouth into the grooves of her hand and squeezes his eyes shut. “I’m sorry.” His throat tightens. “Today, I--”

“No,” she says, so soft. “ _I’m_ sorry. I know the...the weird thing happened.” 

He somehow never had seen it. The weird thing. The Weird Thing. He’s shaken by this term. “Do you know when it will happen?”

She lets out a shattered sigh. “I don’t.”

“...do you...remember what happened to you?” 

“Not really,” she says. A primal memory of the muscle, but not of the heart or mind. He feels deep relief right alongside revulsion. “I just know no one likes it.”

His mind buzzes. He has a thousand questions. He sometimes wishes the song of the Tower was clearer in his head, like back on the First. Perhaps the Allagans had known of this phenomenon; they seemed the type to cultivate such a talent. But he knows, too, the history of their avarice and he feels a spike of protectiveness at the thought of exposing her even to their memory.

The water splashes as she sits forward in the tub. “Raha?”

He meets her gaze and is lanced to the ground. Her eyes threaten tears. 

“You just can’t think about it, okay?” She looks every which way. “Are you...does it…”

He leans forward and cradles her face between his palms. He kisses her hard enough that their teeth clash. His hands are still dirty. He would have to wash her face again. But he kisses her until her wet hands settle on the back of his neck and he feels her relax into the water.

“No,” he says. “It doesn’t change anything. Nothing could.”

His world nearly ended today. And then it didn’t. He would, for her sake, do his best to forget.

* * *

He sees the blood spray from her arm. He watches her stumble and drop her bow. His body’s response is near automatic, summoning cool aether to weave a healing spell even as smoke fills the air. But when he charges forward to find her through the morass, she is not there.

He spins. He thinks of the blood rolling down her bow arm, sticky and dark. 

“Izzie!”

Figures collide in the corner of his eye. He turns and turns and turns but her fiery hair is nowhere to be seen, wholly devoured by the chaos. He swallows down the building panic in his gut.

And then--

A thick silence descends, before his hair stands up and air sucks away from his ears and he dives to the side but it is not enough--

He stumbles to his knees from the concussive force and acrid stench of a fire bomb. Smoke burns his eyes. His ears ring from the biting _kerang_ of gunfire. His shield nor his barriers are ready; the other Scions are scattered across the field. The Garleans must be catching on, he realizes, dark and heavy. They’ve had enough of the Scions’ tricks.

A war machina bears down on him. He spins to the side but the damn thing _feints_. 

_Raha!_

In one moment, he is upright. In the next, he is on the cold ground. The world spins and spins and spins. His mouth fills with dirt; blood paints his teeth. Warmth trails down his chest and sticks to his tunic. Pain, dull at first, crescendos in the back of his head until it is shrieking. 

A familiar voice rises over the din.

_Fuckers! You’ll pay for that!_

He opens his eyes. Blue-black debris flies overhead and then--

“Raha. Raha, look at me, okay? Look at me.”

Slick hands touch his face and turn his head until all he can see is the sea green of her eyes and the red flare of her dirty, war-tangled hair. He blinks. His limbs feel malms away. He can’t move fast enough to stop her from attending to him right here in the middle of a fight. Izzie’s hands slide up and down his chest until her fingers dig into his wound and he bucks in pain. His shoulder feels...incomplete. Bitten off. Wet and gone. Bits of fire dig into his skin. Shrapnel, perhaps.

“Okay. Okay. Okay. I can...no, can’t tourniquet there...cloth...pressure…”

She’s talking to herself.

He hears the tearing of cloth. Her stilted hands press a ripped part of her tunic into his shoulder. He cries out in agony as she pushes and pushes and _pushes_ to try and stop the bleeding. 

Her breathing is sharp and watery in his ear. “What the fuck were you _doing_ ,” she hisses. Her eyes are wide as saucers. “Where did you go?”

He braces himself to grunt out a few words, but he can’t form them.

“No. Don’t talk. Just focus on me. I...I don’t...” She takes a sharp breath and remembers her linkpearl. She pleas for a healer over the line, her voice shaking even as she barks out their location. Her hands are rough and seizing as she hoists him onto a field stretcher, but that is all he remembers before he wakes up under Krile’s care back at the safety of their camp.

He is laid out on a soldier’s cot, groggy and hazed, and he feels a strange anger simmering just below the medicinal fog. He hears his father’s laugh, cruel and thoughtless and drunk. _You’ll never understand. None of us ever has._

Izzie sits in a chair, staring at the thin line revealed by the tent’s flap. Her face is still smeared with black oil and dirt. Her head is tilted slightly, like a garden ornament about to fall in the rain. His heart tumbles strangely.

“Where had you gone?” he croaks.

She jumps a foot in the air before she spins in her chair toward him. Her eyebrows creep near her hairline. In the next instant, she leans over him, hands hovering over his injuries. “I’m right here,” she says.

He thinks to tell her she hadn’t been. She hadn’t been where he thought she was and he thought she died, again, and he couldn’t bear it. Doesn’t she know that? Doesn’t she feel it, too? But her eyes are so wide and blown out and her skin shines so wetly he fears she is sick with fever.

So he buries the anger, deep and dark, and focuses on the feel of her fingers in his hair.

* * *

He has sworn to love a wildfire. But wildfires are not known for their fairness.

The anger, simmering between them, spills out the next morning. She pushes open the tent flap and a warning klaxon sounds off between his ears, seeing the paleness of her brow and the darkness around her eye sockets. She had not slept. Yet her gaze glimmers, dangerous and lucid, and she says to him as she hands him a tray of rations: “You’re not doing this again.”

He squints up at her. Krile had said he likely won’t be returning to this particular engagement, but something in Izzie’s tone feels heavy and final. “I’m sorry?”

“We’re going back to the Stones.”

He sets the tray aside. “I understand I need to recover--”

But she won’t let him finish. “A warfront isn’t for you. You’re too...you’re too reckless.”

For a moment he forgets how to speak, struck dumb by her sheer audacity. “ _I’m_ reckless?”

She glares down at him. Challenging him. “Yes.”

She’s baiting him. He knows this.

“Izzie.” He bites out her name. She doesn’t flinch. “You were injured. It’s my job to protect you. You know that. You agreed to it.”

“It was just a small cut. You exposed yourself for no reason.”

He remembers the blood splatter. Anger, thick as sludge, makes his lungs hurt. “No _reason?_ Izzie Nenelori, you took a hit that would have taken the arm off of any other man!” 

“That’s my job!”

“It is, emphatically, not.”

She purses her lips. Her eyes glitter. He should fear this face, he knows, but he can barely see through his own fury, red and vile. 

“You don’t know anything,” she hisses. “You know what I can do. What I can _survive_.”

Some dam in him breaks. He doesn’t think. He snakes out a hand to seize her by the wrist, as if that might prevent her from proving the power of the Echo here and now, and his heart stutters when her eyes widen. But he glares, intent. “Don’t. Do not even _think_ to joke about that in my presence.”

“Or what?” Her eyes flick to his fingers wrapped around her arm. Her voice is desiccating. “What will you do.” 

“Do you have _any idea_ what it feels like?” His eyes burn. “To watch you throw your life about as if it holds no worth? Do you have any concept of the hole you would leave in our lives, in my life, if your Echo failed you _once_?” He can barely speak for the lump forming in his throat. “What it does to me, every time you shrug off a hit that should flatten you?”

She is silent for a single, heavy beat.

His throat burns as he resists breaking down in sudden, furious tears. “Do you?” he presses.

She tears her wrist from his grasp. She balls her hands into fists. 

“How fucking dare you.” She takes a watery breath before her voice rises like the tide. “I watched you near die _some three times already!”_

His ears ring. Her words hang in the air, dripping and cruel and right. 

“You think I don’t know?” Her cheeks glisten. “What it’s like to watch everything you love in the world fade? Are you really that godsdamn stupid?”

His mouth slackens. His shoulders sag. Tears leak down his face. He remembers, vividly, Alisaie flicking him on the forehead for openly considering his sacrifice for all their sakes. He had been so cavalier. He felt the circumstances had required it, then, and that Alisaie’s reaction had been driven by something a little illogical...

But Alisaie had been protecting Izzie’s heart. Because he hadn’t considered the possibility of the harm he could do to her, even then.

He grips the blanket, cursing his foolishness. Always the idiot boy in her presence.

“You’re right,” he churns out. “I...I’m sorry. I am.”

She turns away from him but she doesn’t storm off. He reaches, gently, for her hand. She does not pull away, but she does not loosen her fist. 

“I struggled to remember, then, that I was...I was still...close enough to a Spoken man for it to matter, and…” He struggles to breathe. “I worry that you think the same thing. That you forget you are still a Spoken woman.”

Her shoulders crumple. Her hands fly to her face. She does not say anything for a long moment and he feels like a monster writhing in chains as he swallows down the desire to sweep her into an embrace. She would turn him away. She must come to him first.

“Am I?” Her voice shakes. “Am I?”

She sits at the end of his bed. He waits until her first sob breaks free before he pulls her to him, tucking her tightly under his chin. He strokes her back and hides his own tears in her hair. His shoulder be damned.

His lips brush her skin as he whispers his adoration. “You are.”

She is the girl he met in Mor Dhona, bright as seltzer. She is a rarity and fleeting and real -- like any girl, yes, but his.

* * *

Even injured, he still tames her. 

His hands rest at her bare waist as she reveals herself to him, word by word. She leans over him until her ruby hair pools in the cave of his collarbones and her taut arms frame his head. Her lips brush his jaw. “I just go crazy, thinking about it,” she admits, quiet, as if it is only the moon watching. “I survived a world without you, once. I don’t...I don’t think I could do it again.”

Before he can reply with words of his own, her teeth graze his chin and seize his lip. She eggs him on. Tell me, she would say, but don’t speak.

He flips her over him and pins her to the mattress. He buries his nose in her scent. Runs his hands down her naked body. Maps her sharp curves and deep scars, presses his thumbs into the dips of her hip bones, mouths her until her chest heaves -- even as she fights him.

His mouth is kind even as he manhandles her. His grasp is gentle but firm; she desires boundaries to rail against and he will give them to her. He drives her body into the mattress. He whispers sweetness into her ear as he does it. _My star. Beautiful and glorious. I will never tire of your body under mine._ He pulls her hair to expose her neck to his chastising teeth. _Do you know how long I've wished for this? How lovely you look, laid bare and taken and mine?_

It is the greatest honor he knows to have her like this, to break her open so the ache comes free and she can fill her heart with joy again. There are some hurts she need not bear. Pain need not be her only constant.

And it is thrilling to remind her who she belongs to. 

He treats these moments like arcanima proofs. Through them, he describes the unknowable with what tools he has. His fingers, his tongue. 

“I... _Raha_ , I…”

Her voice saying his name sets his core alight. He is driven harder and harder until the pressure between them crests like a mad wave.

But when she finally cries out her pleasure and falls lax beneath him, he is the one who feels split in half. He leans over her, spent. His mind keens. His shoulder throbs. Her voice sends him a thousand different places -- to memories and fantasies that are both ancient and new, sometimes the same memory at once. A shattered kind of Echo.

She brushes the hair from his brow. He opens his mouth to speak but nothing comes out when he meets her gaze. Her lingering silence pressurizes the room. He feels lightheaded. She’s holding something back and he no longer has the mind to figure out what, exactly; it may as well be dripping from him along with his sweat. 

Her hand cups his cheek. He closes his eyes.

He would not survive another separation, either.

“It’s not just losing you,” she says. “It’s losing...losing me. Losing the people who remember who I am. I don’t know who I would be.” She looks up at him, wide-eyed and small. “If no one...if you weren’t here to...remind me...”

He lays down and pulls her in against his chest. She presses herself entirely against him, bracing him. His arms tighten around her waist. His fingers thread through her hair. 

“Sometimes I fear I’m no longer tethered anywhere in time,” he confesses, throat tight. Ghosts linger in his blood; that is the true curse of Allag. “That I’m a mistake in the tapestry...and that all could be unwoven in a blink…”

She pulls back just slightly and brushes the backs of her fingers down his jaw. His eyes swim, overwhelmed by the sweetness of her face and the bruising of her lips.

“But we’re here,” he says, voice breaking. “And if I am a mistake, so be it. I will fight for my place. To remain here, with you, as long as I can. Even if that means I must take a hard risk now and again.” His shoulder throbs, as if to be the declarative point on his sentence.

Her answer is simple and shattering. She just says his name. “Raha…”

He pulls her into a kiss. Her voice is what he had followed when all else failed. He named the Musica Universalis after her -- the beating heart of the city, the center of their strange star and the harmonies within. The place where merchants and birds gathered and sang their hopeless, hopeful songs. 

She pulls away. Her back is taut, but her hands are gentle, reaching up to rub his ears, and he is helpless before her. 

"Let me show you something. Tomorrow." She turns her face into his neck. "It might help you understand."

* * *

Ishgard splits the horizon like Halone’s Spear, painted in light and heavy stone. Coerthas’ mountains swell just behind it. From here, everything feels worlds away, even as the wind sears freezing gashes across his face.

But the gravestone feels too small.

Izzie stares at the broken shield, eyes threading seams into the hole, and G’raha feels a rock slowly sink into his stomach.

"That," Izzie says, "is why people can't take blows for me."

A moment passes. And then she tells him everything from the day Haurchefaunt died -- the details Lord de Fortemps could not bear to put in his memoirs. The warm twilight sky. How she and Haurchefaunt only needed share a single look before they both sprang into action. How they moved in sync, down a walkway gilded in purple and gold.

How he said he couldn’t bear the thought of losing her, instead. How she watched the light leave his eyes. 

She doesn't say it, but G’raha can feel it in her thoughts. _It should have been me._

He guards her from the worst of the chill with his shoulders. "You could never know for sure. What might have happened if he hadn't been there."

Izzie's gazes upon the gravestone with a heaviness only worn by those who have made the same calculation over and over. "And Edmont wouldn't want me to think this way. I know. But I'm always going to wonder."

G'raha purses his lips. He remembers something a first generation settler of the Crystarium once told him. "That's the curse of the living, I'm afraid."

She eyes him. He can't pin if it's suspicion or annoyance or concern, her face half-hidden in a scarf.

"He knew who I was. Beyond the Warrior of Light. Like...someone else I once knew." She shoulder checks him hard enough that air rushes from his lungs, but he deserves it, teasing or no. "I was in a really bad place for a really long time before you found me again in another world. But even you…" Her gaze slides away and he snakes an arm around her shoulder. "...well, you know," she grumbles.

Even he almost died for her.

"So that's why it makes me crazy. When people try to help me. It's just easier for you to...not."

"But it isn't," he says softly. 

Her hat re-shapes as her ears flatten.

"You've seen so much loss,” he says. “But what does that mean you'll do? Will you love others and receive none in return, in the hopes of sparing them some dark fate?"

She grumbles something, which signals to him he's right.

"It doesn't work like that, my love," he whispers into her ear, hiding the words from the icy wind. "And you, more than anyone, deserve the fullness of affection people have for you."

She bunches her gloved hands near her face, clawing at her cheeks before hiding her eyes in her palms. He thinks perhaps they've reached the end of it when she says: "I know you're right."

His heart jumps. "I do so love to hear it."

She gives the smallest snort of a laugh. He smiles into her wool cap.

“Ma always said the world doesn't owe us anything." Her shoulders bunch forward. "So it feels stupid to say I'm due for something." She pins him with her eyes. The heat in her gaze turns his frozen legs to water. "But maybe I am. I think I've paid for it enough."

She curls in around him against the cold. She suddenly sucks in a breath. It mists in the frozen air, like his own words inside his head.

"I want you with me forever," she says. "I mean it.” She hides her face against his neck and he's shot through with golden light. “Rings and everything.”

He feels dunked into champagne. Thoughts short out in a fizzy fog.

She leans back and searches his face. “Raha?”

“I want it very much.” His words spill out fast. “I want to be tied to you in any way I can manage. I never want to make the mistake of separating myself from you, ever again.” The cold air in his lungs grounds him. “If you’re willing to have me, of course.”

She stops her strange searching and her eyes land on the grave. She laughs like she has been surprised by what she sees. “Sorry,” she says. “I know that’s sudden.”

“Don’t apologize,” he says, perhaps too quickly. “We’ll do it right. With all the pomp and circumstance you deserve.”

He gets the reaction he seeks. Her head leans back in offended shock, eyes dancing over his face.

“No.” She glares at him. He grins, helpless. “No! I’m gonna do it my way and you’re gonna like it.”

“You sound very certain. As if I might not be scheming anything of my own.”

She scans his face. “You’re not.” Despite these revelations being fresh, her voice rings with uncertainty. She looks so concerned -- her brow so furrowed in consideration -- that he pulls her into a kiss. He can’t stop smiling. He is dumbstruck.

He feels a conviction so dense that he is, for a moment, cleaved to the universe.

When he pulls back, she is beaming.

**Author's Note:**

> What began as me writing my absolute drug of choice - hurt/comfort - turned into this pondering on the Echo and its implications. Is it canon compliant? I'm not sure! Is the Echo kind of terrifying when you sit down to think about it for a second? I would say hell yes. Lmao. (Also if you've seen the entire front section before, that would be because it was one of my FFXIV Write bits on tumblr...Do Not Perceive Me. LOL)
> 
> huge thanks to @masqvia whose commentary not only helped me nail down the thematic center of this fic as well as its ending but who also beta'd it. As always, bless up to the OG, ilu!!!!


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